NAME attribute value format

Hello,

I'm looking for clarification about what values are permitted for NAME 
attributes, e.g. in <TMPL_VAR NAME="WHATEVER">.

The documentation ( 
http://html-template.sourceforge.net/html_template.html ) says that these 
characters are allowed: Numbers, letters, '.', '/', '+', '-' and '_'.

I've been using colons (":") in my NAME values for some time now (with 
HTML::Template v2.7) without realizing that it's not "allowed", and it's 
worked as expected.

I just took a look at the source code, and it appears that the software will 
parse NAME attribute values including almost any character.  I don't know if 
any additional checking of those values is performed later.  I personally 
think that it's best for software to actually restrict the format of input 
to what's documented, as much as possible.

In any case, I need to know for sure what values are permitted.  I'm writing 
an application, that I'll be releasing as free software, that interacts with 
HTML::Template and it's very important that I write the software and 
documentation with the proper format of NAME values taken into account.

For the values used in my application that correspond to <TMPL_VAR> NAME 
values, I'm using the same format as HTML 4.01 ID / NAME tokens:
[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z0-9_:.-]*

(See http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/types.html#type-id )

So, the only issue for me is the ":" character, but I don't plan to change 
the format definition I'm using and I need to know whether I can officially 
use that character in HTML::Template NAME values or if I have to warn my 
users about the issue.

Thanks for the great piece of software!  Obviously the best thing for me 
would be if I could legitimately use the ":" character, but the most 
important thing is to find out definitely one way or the other.

Thanks,
Jesse McCarthy

http://www.nextlevelarts.com/


P.S. The documentation I linked to contains information about the mailing 
list that doesn't match information found elsewhere on the site and in the 
v2.8 documentation on CPAN -- not sure if that information is still viable? 



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